Spend classification may appear to be a commodity technology, but at the item level, it takes years to build and many more to refine and optimize; providers considering getting into the item-level classification market need to realize that creating an analytics front-end is the easy part, and should consider the time to build their own classification toolset, or how best to incorporate third-party technology from others with a classification capability. The window is narrowing for potential classification acquisitions as very few small-named players who can enable this capability remain.